YouTube outage affects users across the United States and beyond
YouTube suffered a major outage affecting users worldwide, which was fully restored later that evening.
YouTube suffered a widespread outage on 19 February, affecting thousands of users in the United States and several other countries, including Canada, India, the Philippines, Australia and Russia. The disruption began in the evening local time and led to a sharp increase in reports from users unable to access the platform via the web or mobile apps.
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The incident also appeared to coincide with problems affecting other Google services, raising questions about a broader technical issue within the company’s infrastructure. While access was gradually restored over the following hours, some users continued to experience limited functionality, particularly with personalised recommendations.
Outage begins and spreads across regions
The disruption began around 8 PM Eastern time, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector. Reports climbed rapidly, peaking at approximately 338,000 before gradually declining as services began to recover. Users reported being unable to load the YouTube homepage, watch videos or use the mobile app, with some noting that the website became inaccessible before the app stopped working.
Although the United States appeared to be the most affected, reports also emerged from users in Canada, India, the Philippines, Australia and Russia. Social media platforms and forums such as Reddit quickly filled with posts from users seeking confirmation of the outage and sharing updates on service availability in their regions.
By around 9:22 PM Eastern time, many users were still reporting problems, particularly with loading content or accessing the platform at all. Some users noted that the service appeared partially restored, with the homepage loading but no recommended videos displayed. Others reported that they could not sign in or that video playback failed to start, indicating that different parts of the platform were affected to varying degrees.
Related disruptions and user reports
In addition to YouTube, Downdetector recorded thousands of reports of Google being down around the same time. This suggested a potential link between the YouTube outage and other Google services, though the company did not immediately confirm the cause of the disruption.
Reports from individual users highlighted that the outage persisted well into the evening. As late as 9:53 PM Eastern time, some users reported that both YouTube and Google Home Assistant remained inaccessible, suggesting the issue extended beyond a brief service interruption. Others reported intermittent access, with features returning in stages rather than all at once.
The staggered restoration of services led to confusion among users, with some believing the outage had been resolved while others continued to face disruptions. This uneven recovery is common in large-scale cloud-based systems, where different servers and regions may be restored at different times depending on the nature of the fault and the mitigation steps taken.
Service restoration and response from YouTube
By 10:12 PM Eastern time, Team YouTube confirmed on X that the issue had been completely fixed. The company did not provide a detailed explanation of the outage’s cause but acknowledged that there had been a problem earlier in the evening. Before the full resolution, YouTube had indicated that its recommendation system was experiencing issues, even after the homepage had returned for some users.
The lack of immediate clarity about the root cause reflects a broader trend among large technology companies: prioritising rapid restoration over detailed public explanations. While such incidents are relatively rare given the scale and resilience of modern cloud infrastructure, they can still have significant impacts on users and creators who rely on these platforms for communication, entertainment and income.
For many users, the outage served as a reminder of the dependence on centralised digital services and the potential ripple effects when they fail. Although YouTube’s service was restored within a few hours, the incident highlighted the complexity of operating global platforms with billions of users and the challenges involved in maintaining uninterrupted access.
